By the 1960s, Duchamp was known as a premier chess player. His brothers had taught him to play the game when he was a teenager, and he’d been improving by leaps and bounds ever since.

For Marcel Duchamp, chess was almost everything. As his friend, the author Henri-Pierre Roché, noted: “He needed a good chess game like a baby needs his bottle.” It featured throughout his art career, ...

In old age, he founded the Marcel Duchamp Chess Endowment Fund in support of American chess, and in 1967—a year before his death—participated in a tournament in Monte Carlo.

Image: 14.5 x 22 in. (36.83 x 55.88 cm.) In 1963, the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum) launched Marcel Duchamp's first major retrospective of the conceptual Dadaist's career. Later ...

But for years, Duchamp, who lived in a modest, $40-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, told his friends he’d given art up for chess and philosophical writing.

New York, November 20, 1945. Archives Marcel Duchamp, Photographies, AMD, Paris Born in France in 1887, Duchamp emigrated to the United States in 1915.